Everyone loves peace. After all, who does not aspire to comfort and security, for themselves, their families, and their communities, to be unrestrained by threats to live in a world free from violence? Such desires are commonly held across time and space. They are also powerful drivers of human behaviour. Nevertheless, peace can also arouse scepticism, not least owing to the apparent plasticity of the term and the varied (and frequently dubious) ends and means to which peace is often applied. As the sociologist and principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies Johan Galtung long ago observed: “Few words are so often used and abused”. Claims to ‘peace’, he noted, often serve as a way of justifying policies and projects, even if they seem rather tenuously related to the peace that they claim. They are also especially used as a method for obtaining verbal consensus. Thus, he concluded, “it is hard to be all-out against peace.”1
Galtung’s observation is that peace is a slippery term, bound up in questions of power, and capable of serving diverse political and discursive ends. It may therefore be generally desired but also hard to take seriously. Such considerations help to explain the relatively limited historical research on peacemaking and some of the challenges associated with it. In connection with the history of Christian mission specifically, the well-known entanglements of mission with histories of race, colonial expansion, and violence are also salient. In this context, peace may be less than benign, and appear more akin to coercive pacification. Taken together, these factors might be assumed to render nineteenth-century missions a thoroughly unpromising site for encountering peace, much less examining its contours. This volume contends otherwise. Indeed, it demonstrates that ideas and practices of peace abounded within this context, and that interrogation of them can enrich our understanding on a range of fronts. These understandings relate to the book’s core themes of missions, empire, violence, and peacemaking, but also connect with associated areas of historical and contemporary concern—religion and politics, Christian ethics, humanitarianism, and the ethics of encounter, to name a few.
Pacifying Missions is not an apologia for the essential peacefulness of Christian missionary activity, or of Christianity as such, and should not be misread in these terms. Rather, it takes the question of peace to be just that: a genuine question to be probed. The volume employs the theme as a frame for exploring missionary activity. It takes as axiomatic that missionary claims for peace are decidedly contested and contestable—for historical observers and
This volume builds upon recent research on peacemaking in Christian mission, notably research on the New Zealand missions as well as on Christianity and the Pacific. My own interest in these questions arose initially through reflection on New Zealand, where missionary peacemaking was once widely venerated, reflecting to a considerable extent missionaries’ own characterisation of their achievements. Uncritical adulation withered dramatically in the postcolonial era, yet if any fondness for earlier missionaries remained it was often connected to aspects of their humanitarian activism and contributions to intertribal peacemaking. Despite this, I have previously noted that no sustained examination of nineteenth-century missionaries’ ideas about peace, or applications of it, had ever been undertaken in New Zealand or elsewhere.2 The support of a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Grant subsequently enabled exploration of some aspects of the New Zealand story.3 Pacifying Missions deliberately extends that research, bringing it into conversation with cases from further afield, in the Pacific region and in Africa. It seeks to explicate the place of peace in nineteenth-century missionary Christianity and its contexts, yielding fresh insights into the missionary projects of that era in the process.
The volume’s immediate genesis lies in a memorable workshop, “Messengers of Peace? Global Perspectives on Peace, Conflict, and Nineteenth-Century Missions”. This was held at Victoria University of Wellington in July 2018. The workshop’s title alluded to two significant landmarks in the history of mission in the Pacific. The first relates to the most famous of all European missionaries to the region, the pioneer London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary John Williams. Williams initially landed at Ra’iatea near Tahiti in 1817, but soon after moved with Tahitian converts to the Cook Islands. It was in Rarotonga that he
A second Pacific allusion relates to Niel Gunson’s seminal work on mission in the “South Seas” in the years from 1797 to 1860. Gunson’s book, a version of his doctoral thesis, was entitled Messengers of Grace.4 This title reflected Gunson’s observation that missionary activity in that time and place was largely undertaken by evangelical Protestants, and that their approach was profoundly influenced by Calvinistic revivalism. As Gunson put it, “true conversion” was the principal object of all the evangelical missionaries. Their vocation was to convince people of their innate depravity, their need for a saviour, or mediator with God, and of belief in the atonement and consequent salvation of believers. Their central message, Gunson suggests, was the evangelical doctrine of Grace. Whereas Gunson presented his title forthrightly as a statement, our workshop deliberately posed peace as a question to be tested and probed in a broader range of locations. How central, or important, were notions of peace for the missions, and in what ways exactly?
Each of the chapters that follow were originally presented as papers to the workshop and reflect the agenda it laid out. Contributors shared initial drafts prior to gathering to listen, discuss, and critique each other’s work before settling down to revisions. The occasion was a marvellous model of rigorous collegiality, and I extend my thanks first and foremost to the contributors along with all others who participated, especially our discussants Philip Fountain, Allan Davidson, Bernardo Brown, and Peggy Brock, who provided incisive commentary and were superb conversation partners. Aliki Kalliabetsos and Annie Mercer generously assisted with practical arrangements. The support of the Royal Society of New Zealand made the workshop possible. Ongoing conversations with colleagues at Victoria University of Wellington have stimulated, sharpened, and challenged my thinking on these issues, and I am especially grateful to Philip Fountain, Paul Morris, and Chris Marshall in this regard. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the publishing team at Brill, the series editors, and the generous and helpful comments of the anonymous peer reviewer.
Finally, it is impossible to explain this immediate background to the volume without paying special tribute to our friend and colleague Jeffrey L. Cox
Geoffrey Troughton
Bibliography
Cox, Jeffrey. The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700. London: Routledge, 2008.
Cox, Jeffrey. The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Cox, Jeffrey. Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91.
Gunson, Niel. Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas, 1797–1860. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Troughton, Geoffrey. “Missionaries, Historians and the Peace Tradition in New Zealand.” In Te Rongopai 1814 ‘Takoto te pai!’: Bicentenary Reflections on Christian Beginnings and Developments in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Allan K. Davidson, Stuart Lange, Peter J. Lineham, and Adrienne Puckey, 228–45. Auckland: General Synod Office, Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia, 2014.
Troughton, Geoffrey. “Scripture, Piety and the Practice of Peace in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Missions,” Studies in World Christianity 25, no. 2 (2019): 128–44.
Troughton, Geoffrey, ed. Saints and Stirrers: Christianity, Conflict and Peacemaking in New Zealand, 1814–1945. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2017.
Troughton, Geoffrey, and Philip Fountain, eds. Pursuing Peace: Christianity and the Peace Tradition in New Zealand. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2018.
Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167.
Geoffrey Troughton, “Missionaries, Historians and the Peace Tradition in New Zealand,” in Te Rongopai 1814 ‘Takoto te pai!’: Bicentenary Reflections on Christian Beginnings and Developments in Aotearoa New Zealand, eds. Allan K. Davidson, Stuart Lange, Peter J. Lineham, and Adrienne Puckey (Auckland: General Synod Office, Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia, 2014), 228–45.
See Geoffrey Troughton, ed., Saints and Stirrers: Christianity, Conflict and Peacemaking in New Zealand, 1814–1945 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2017); Geoffrey Troughton and Philip Fountain, eds., Pursuing Peace: Christianity and the Peace Tradition in New Zealand (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2018); Geoffrey Troughton, “Scripture, Piety and the Practice of Peace in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Missions,” Studies in World Christianity 25, no. 2 (2019): 128–44.
Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas, 1797–1860 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978).
The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (London: Routledge, 2008).